With the increasing development of broadband technology,the speed of packets forwarding needs to be over gigabits per second for the backbone routers.Traditional routers have some insuperable barriers and can not solve the problem based on shared-bus and central processing unit.It is a great challenge for the future router architecture.In this article,the authors survey the recent advances in the research of broadband IP router,and analyze the architecture design of the fourth generation backbone router in detail.Finally,some challenging open problems are identified.